Leena Jang: Campaign colour

Leena the teacher

Candidate for Bangkok governor Leena Jangjanja ('Leena Jang') is putting her appearance fee from acting in director Poj Anon's latest kathoey comedy to good use.

Leena takes on the role of a crafty teacher in the comedy about teen football players, Taew Te Teen Rabert (แต๋วเตะตีนระเบิด).

She dresses in prim teacher's garb, two pairs of glasses, and high heels which do not exceed two inches - compared to the 6-inch ankle-busters she likes to wear normally.

'Wearing short short high-heeled shoes made me feel a little less confident,' she jokes.

Poj is shooting the kathoey movie in Bang Kae district. Leena says she is grateful to Poj for following her career and casting her in the film. 

She puts the B7,000 she makes from each scene in which she appears into her campaign for governor. 

She has spent some of the mnoney into printing name cards to introduce herself to voters (as if the eccentric campaigner, who likes to wear shocking pink, really needed any introduction).

Leena also ran in the campaign for governor last September. A new election has been called after incumbent Apirak Kosayodhin quit over a firetrucks purchase scandal.

Leena is rescued from the canal

Leena, a lawyer and mother of two, who sells beauty products on the side, was showing voters how to get off a ferry in the Saen Saeb canal when she fell in. 

A day later, she took her campaign team to Samwa canal - to show voters how to swim - when her team leader entered the water deliberately, but then drowned.

Keeping my head down

In the market below, bare-chested men haul about large speakers. They are setting up a small stage in a carkpark near the canal.

They have parked a truck at one end of the carpark, to stop cars coming in. When I saw them, I wondered nervously if the militant anti-government group People's Alliance for Democracy had joined us.

I suspect not...it's probably just a concert. We don't get many of them around here, even though we have a school not five minutes' walk away.

It will be good to unwind, for those of us who are here to watch it. I shall be at work.

If PAD supporters did turn up in my market, how would I react? I don't want to think about it.

The political events of the last few weeks have left me stressed enough as it is...and I am not one of the unfortunate 300,000 or more whose travel plans were disrupted by PAD's occupation of the city's airports.

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My partner  Maiyuu had a fit a few days ago. I heard a ruckus in his bathroom and went to investigate.

He was standing with his right hand gnarled in a strange shape. His skin colour was a deathly pale, and he looked dazed and remote.

He convulsed, his body knocking things off shelves.

I helped him out of the bathroom and put him on the floor. I searched in vain for a hard object which I could insert between his teeth, if in fact it was a fit he was having.

We live in a gay household, so almost by definition we are impractical. We do not put hard objects aside in the event one of us should have a fit.

After his body relaxed, I helped him to his bed, where he spent the next day and half sleeping off whatever had made him ill.

Maiyuu still feels dizzy when he gets up from his bed ...but then he spends most of his days on his back watching television anyway, so it's no big inconvenience.

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I self-censored a post on the PAD and the monarchy, called a Sickly Shade of Yellow. It is not the first time I have censored the political content of posts which appear on this blog, and I know other Thai-based bloggers who do the same.

In the original, I included several quotes from the Economist newspaper. After thinking about it a few minutes, I took the quotes down.

The last time an Economist article deemed offensive to the monarchy appeared, newsstand sales were banned and it was quickly removed from the streets.

This time, so far, I have heard nothing, which is encouraging. If it is banned, 'authorities' won't want vestiges of the thing remaining on blogs, webboards or anywhere else.

I learned things from that article in the Economist which we are not permitted to know here.

The media censors itself, so that content which could be deemed offensive under Thailand's strict lese majeste laws is removed before it ever gets to the public. Punitive defamation and contempt of court laws bring up the rear, stifling fledgling free speech.

As a Westerner brought up in a culture of free speech, I am not used to having people decide for me what I should and should not know.

The Western media doesn't tell people everything either, but nor is it often cowed into submission by laws designed to silence public debate.

More frequently, it will rail against them, or even flout them, to show its displeasure.

I do not like the idea of sharing a small cell with 60 other men for months on end without charge, for daring to speak my mind. Thai prison reform...is there such a thing?

Ghost stories

'Is there a real-life Jason?' asked Bird.

I teach English to Bird and one other youngster every week.

He is a fan of foreign horror movies, and wanted to know if the character of Jason Voorhees, from the Friday the 13th movies, was based on a real person.

'No, though some have tried,' I said.

'Well, Thailand has one,' he said excitedly, before telling me the story of See Oui, a Chinese farmer who migrated to Thailand in the 1940s, and turned to eating children to boost his fading strength (he had tuberculosis).

See Oui's story was turned into the 2004 thriller, Zee Oui (see poster above).

Thailand's most notorious serial killer, his mummified body now lies at Sririraj Medical Museum, part of Sririraj Hospital in Bangkok. You can read about what this grisly museum - which includes a museum of forensic medicine - has to offer, at the 'dark destinations' website, here (link harvested - it died).

See Oui is spelt in different ways. Some refer to him as See Uey Sae Ung; on his display case, it's Si Quey.

The 'dark destinations' website is a guide to spooky places here and overseas. The Sririraj museum also contains exhibits related to the death of Ananda Mahidol, also known as Rama VIII, the present King's elder brother.

A brief description of Rama VIII's demise gave me a start; censorship rules would normally forbid Thais from talking in such terms about royalty. Then I realised that the website is not Thai, but comes from overseas.

My students, aged 13, spent the next hour telling me about Thai ghost stories, including spirits which are thought to inhabit the market in which we live, the canal which runs past us, and even a cemetery they had visited.

When they told me creepy things, they would perform a strange gesture: smacking their lips with one hand and then tossing whatever they took from their lips out to one side.

I asked them what they were doing. 'It's a way of making sure the spirits do not enter our body when we talk about them,' said Teuy, my other student.

'Do you believe in ghosts?' she asked.

'Probably,' I said.

'Do you believe that spirits of the dead rise to heaven?' asked Teuy, who comes across as more wordly wise than Mr Bird - who earlier asked me if planes flew into the World Trade Centre towers because the buildings were built too high.

'No.'

'I don't believe in that either,' she said.

Bird and Teuy both claim to have seen ghosts. They were together when they sighted one, they told me excitedly.

Thai students in their mid-teens are evidently no strangers to blood and gore.

Each week, well before the witching hour, when all good children are tucked up in bed, we meet in an old internet shop in the market.

I turned up yesterday just as the pair were having something to eat, which they had ordered from a stall nearby.

Darkness was gathering outside. I didn't know it at the time, but the Moon, Venus and Jupiter had arranged themselves in the sky to resemble an odd grin (see image above, and thank you to reader Ukai for his comment on this post).

While I waited for them to finish, the shop owner, Pee song, put on a Hollywood action movie.

It was full of swearing, blood, and high-paced action, and not suitable viewing for youngsters their age, I would have thought. Needless to say, they had seen it many times before.

Pee Song teaches maths to these youngsters most days after school. He asked me if I would like to teach them English two days a week, as I once taught customers at his shop several years before. I am happy to come, as I enjoy their company.

Song, aged in his 50s, has himself seen a ghost in the market where we live - in an old picture theatre which used to sit opposite his shop.

The cinema was long ago pulled down. After that, it became a petrol station, and a likay (Thai vaudeville) theatre; now it's an humble moo gra ta eatery, which hardly offers the same moody atmosphere.

Where do ghosts go when there are no longer creepy places for them to inhabit?

According to my young students, ghosts can move houses, even from one province to another.

They are keen for me to learn more about Thai horror stories, and have asked Pee Song to find out when the Sririraj Horror Museum opens next.

We will go as a group. Pee Song can be head ghoul, our students junior ghosts. As a cynical farang with few ghost sightings or creepy tales to offer of his own, I'll be understudy.

Unsettling times

I was walking down a dark lane towards my condo last night. A work friend had just dropped me off. In the gloom I made out the figure of my boyfriend, heading towards me.

'I am going to get food,' said Maiyuu.

I stopped him to ask for a kiss first. No one was watching, so he extended his cheek.

Maiyuu has the most beautiful eyes, I noticed last night. How come I have never spotted that before?

He also has terrific eyesight. Mine is horrible, and deteriorates further by the year.

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'Everywhere I go these days, people follow me, keeping an eye on my movements,' Maiyuu told me.

What?

I thought Maiyuu was being clever with words. He likes to talk in riddles, to fool his silly farang boyfriend.

'A group of gays follows me whenever I go outside, and keep an eye on me even when I am in the condo,' he said.

Maiyuu had just returned from the market, where he went to get food.

Food sellers in the market itself had closed, or he did not fancy the look of anything there. So he went further afield in search of something to eat.

'Sometimes when I go out, they circle the block 10 or 15 times as they follow me...they are teasing,' he said.

'Do you know who it is?' I asked.

'Yes...they live in Lad Phrao, but they are staying around here...possibly with a woman friend from this condo,' he said.

Maiyuu reeled off a few names. He has mentioned them before. Former friends with whom he had now fallen out?

Strange.

'Do they want to hurt you?' I asked.

'I am not scared of them. If they have bad intentions, bad things are come back at them, sooner or later,' he said philosophically.

Maiyuu took me to the window of his room, which overlooks the market.

'You see the guys gathered way over there, in that opening in the street opposite us?'

The street runs at right angles to the market. It is separated from us by a large block of slum housing.

I squinted, screwed up my eyes. It was dark, and I could barely make them out. Maiyuu had trained his eagle-like eyesight on them.

'That's them. They have left their car and are watching us,' he said.

'Do they know you have a farang boyfriend?'I asked.

'Yes.'

'Well, would they like me to sit on them? I'll make their eyes pop out,' I said.

Maiyuu claims he is not scared, but I notice he checked the lock on the door twice before bed.

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It's cool outside. Foreign tourists trapped in Bangkok by the forced closure of its two main airports are probably enjoying the weather; it feels just like home.

The political troubles, however, are fraying people's nerves. In the bus yesterday, a noisy group of men in their 30s spooked fellow passengers. I was sitting at the back, close to the noise-makers.

The men were talking loudly, but were not doing any harm. However, passengers in front kept looking back to see what they were doing.

I doubt they were supporters of the People's Alliance for Democracy, the militant group which has taken over the city's airports. They were speaking in the Esan (northeastern) dialect. If anything, they were probably supporters of the government, not the PAD.

Maybe they were just drunk. Normally they would not attract much attention, but now...

At work the other night, we heard a loud bang.

A news story appeared on the internet saying a bomb had gone off in a market close to my work.

Sixteen people were injured in the grenade attack, which was unconnected to the PAD protest.

Stall owners had gathered in the market to oppose a plan by landowners to redevelop the area.

Yet another group with vested interests has spotted a weakness in the system, and is taking the law into its own hands rather than tolerate having to share with others. I wonder if they were inspired by the lawless example set by the PAD, which is illegally occupying the city's airports?

Old and musty

My boyfriend left on his trip to the provinces to sell bags yesterday. It is his first time away from home in weeks, as his work appears to have dried up. ‘It is more fun being at home than working – I can cook, and look after you,’ he says.

I do not mind that Maiyuu has no work to do.

When he is at home, I do welcome the occasional break, such as when he pops outside to buy something in the market, or visits his friends in the condo.

We shoot each other 100 glances every day. They are our ‘making sure' glances. I worry that I may have done something to upset him, and vice versa.

However, now that he is away all day, I miss my Thai guy. We have fun together... moments when he will say something funny, and I have the wit to reply in similar vein.

A recurring joke is that I am getting fat and old. My eyesight is also getting worse.

‘Soon I will need to guide you everywhere...I can be your human walking stick,’ he says.

Or: ‘You smell like an old man.’

‘How do old men smell?’

‘Musty.’

The day before he left, Maiyuu visited the hairdresser. He has come back with his hair cut in a new, super-short style, with a small tail at the back.

‘You are more handsome,’ I say approvingly, as I pass my hands through his hair.

‘Can’t you keep your hands to yourself? You are like an octopus,’ he replies.

The first payment from the extra work I am doing has arrived. We are both excited, because we will be able to buy a few things which for months we have been unable to afford.
The night before pay day, we went to bed at the same hour, but neither of us could sleep.

Half an hour later, he heard me stirring on my bed.

‘I smell old man!’ he called out.

In his absence, I talk to myself to stave off loneliness, but it is not the same.

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The mad man who lives along the railway line below has just fed his chickens. They shut up briefly while they gobble down their food, before resuming their chicken noise.

The trains start about 6.30am, but he’s already up, as are his chickens, who squawk most of the day.

The other day they were mysteriously quiet. I walked out onto the balcony and noticed he had filled the open-sided tin shed next to his place, where he raises the birds, with a large mound of soil. ‘Maybe he’s buried them,’ I said to Maiyuu hopefully.

Alas not. The noise resumed a day or so later, when he removed the soil again and their squawking again filled the air.

This morning as I write, he has lit a fire inside his shed, and is working on his motorbike. The man sells Thai desserts on a cart, which he attaches to the bike.

What is it about men and sheds? He spends more time down there with his chickens than he does with his own family.

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